Twitter, Spotify, Reddit go offline as hackers attack multiple sites

Dyn, one of the world's biggest internet performance management companies, recovered from a 3-hour outage.

A DDoS attack on multiple sites, including Twitter, has caused a massive outageREUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

Several popular websites and services suffered a major denial-of-service (DDoS) attack at the hands of hackers, causing a massive outage in several parts of the world. Depending on the user's location, sites including Twitter, Spotify, Reddit and SoundCloud are inaccessible.

The outage on multiple sites is a result of an attack on the source – Dyn – a DNS provider. When an attack is targeted towards a DNS provider, the traffic on the computers cannot be routed anywhere, which causes an outage for the targeted site.

According to TechCrunch, other sites including, Box, Boston Globe, Etsy, New York Times, Github, Airbnb, Shopify, Freshbooks, Heroku and Vox Media properties are experiencing issues. The attack is primarily targeted towards users in the US, while those in Europe and Asia are having some luck in accessing some sites.

"This attack is mainly impacting US East and is impacting Managed DNS customers in this region. Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue," Dyn said on its status page.

Affected sites have acknowledged the outage by tweeting it out to its users. Spotify said that it is "having some issues right now and investigating," while SoundCloud said users on iOS platform are experiencing playback issues. GitHub called it "a global event" which affected an upstream DNS provider.

Update at 1:36 UTC:

Dyn updated its status page saying the services have been fully restored. Based on the DNS provider's status, the outage lasted about three hours. Affected websites are also reporting that the services are back to normal.